Will Eisner Art: 3:00 AM Father (1981)

WILL EISNER
(1917-2005) • Original short story “3:00 AM Father” (1981)
The vast majority of Will Eisner’s comic art pages
pages are in crisp black and white, certainly
including each and every Spirit story from the Golden
Age of Comics. But later in his career he periodically
added wash tones to hard line art in some short
stories. “Wash” is a gray tone created by diluting
dense black India ink with water: the more water that
is added, the lighter the gray becomes, and for a
master artist like Eisner, this unlimited tonal range
simply created a broader palette with which to work.
The technique works especially well on this
middle-of-the-night universal parent story, created in
1981 as part of the “Garbage Cans” chapter collected
in New York: The Big City. The floating
foreground panel planes against the cityscape and
approaching garbage truck is typical of Eisner’s
constant inventiveness with page composition.